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By Gary Stoller, USA TODAY
Travel agents Patricia and Robert Watson
celebrated a very different kind of anniversary
at a Connecticut restaurant Saturday night.
Two years ago, Patricia was
evacuated from Europe to New York by air ambulance
after having a stroke on a business trip with her
husband. "Every night I bow to MedjetAssist, because
they evacuated me and had a lot to do with my
recovery," says the 59-year-old White Plains, N.Y.,
resident.
Alabama-based MedjetAssist is
one of many companies that insure travelers for
emergency air evacuations to appropriate medical
facilities. For the Watsons, such coverage paid off.
They paid less than $300 for annual coverage, and
MedjetAssist says their London-New York air
ambulance flight on a Learjet cost about $40,000.
Many business travelers head
abroad without coverage, apparently believing the
odds of a medical evacuation are very small. But the
Dec. 26 Indian Ocean tsunami, various terrorist
bombings and everyday illnesses and injuries suggest
such coverage can be beneficial.
"The tsunami has highlighted
the need to be more prepared," says Bradley Connor,
a New York-based doctor and president of the
International Society of Travel Medicine.
General health insurance
policies often do not provide evacuation coverage
abroad. Phyllis Kozarsky, a physician who consults
at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, advises business travelers to check
their own or their employers' policies.
Leilani Brown of underwriter
American International Group says coverage under
employers' broad travel insurance policies often
goes unnoticed. "A lot of the time, employees don't
know it exists," she says.
Problems do happen
One of every two travelers
heading to a foreign country will experience a
health problem, Kozarsky says. Most problems are
relatively minor, such as traveler's diarrhea, but
heart attacks, motor vehicle accidents and other
more serious conditions are common.
Choosing which company to
provide air-evacuation coverage can be confusing.
Other travel insurance benefits may be bundled with
the evacuation coverage, and terms of the coverage
may vary. "It's tough to figure out," Connor says.
"It requires knowledge of the field and reading all
the fine print."
International SOS, which says
it was contracted for nearly 12,000 evacuations last
year, is considered the industry giant. Based in
London and Singapore, it provides numerous other
medical services and has 22 clinics worldwide. The
company, which also has U.S. offices, uses its own
leased aircraft and those of air-ambulance
companies.
Maryland-based Medex charges
as little as $3.75 a day for a single traveler,
while others such as Travel Guard International
offer per-trip and annual rates. Medex says that for
an extra 25 cents a day, travelers abroad can
receive up to $100,000 medical coverage. Companies
can pay up to hundreds of thousands of dollars
yearly for evacuation coverage, depending on staff
size, frequency of travel and destinations.
Travel Guard and MedjetAssist
let their customers choose the hospital to which
they'll be evacuated, including a hometown hospital.
Other companies evacuate travelers to the nearest
quality medical facility equipped to handle the
illness or injury.
Patient's condition
important
Lyndon Laminack, a former
International SOS medical director who now works for
an insurance firm, advises travelers to ask each
company how good its infrastructure is in the area
where they're traveling. "Ask who does the
decision-making for the evacuation," he says. "Is it
made by an insurance company, by the company doing
the evacuation or by the traveler and the traveler's
doctor?"
Under some medical
conditions, an evacuation by air shouldn't be
attempted, doctors say. Those conditions may include
a recent surgery, a heart attack, a sinus condition
or the bends.
Laminack says that, like many
medical situations, a doctor must consider a
person's condition and the quality of medical care
in a country while weighing the pros and cons of an
evacuation. "If you have a heart attack in Dubai,
you shouldn't be flying," he says. "If you're in the
Congo, the benefit of getting you out outweighs the
risk of putting you in the air."
Bala Subramanian, a
cardiologist in Slidell, La., warns travelers that
not all companies provide hassle-free evacuation. He
received emergency treatment at a hospital in
southern India after reporting chest pains and
requested an evacuation from a European firm
contracted by his travel insurance company.
The firm's doctor advised
against an angiogram but requested an exercise test,
Subramanian says. He refused, believing that in his
condition such a test could be dangerous. "Imagine
if I didn't have experience as a cardiologist?" he
says. "An exercise test could have killed me."
Subsequent hospital tests
diagnosed "critical narrowing of a blood vessel,"
Subramanian says, and a successful angioplasty
operation was performed. The cardiologist says the
European firm had to repeatedly be reminded about
his claim and, 11 days after he asked to be
evacuated, it was forwarded to his insurance
company, which agreed to pay for his evacuation and
hospital expenses.
He was given business-class
tickets to London on British Airways. Terms of the
evacuation coverage didn't provide for transport
back to the USA, so he had to cash in frequent-flier
miles to get back to Louisiana.
Other business travelers
report better treatment. David Shull, a physician in
Traverse City, Mich., broke his hip in October in
Sri Lanka. He had paid $140 to Travel Guard for
travel coverage up to $300,000, including evacuation
to the nearest quality medical facility. He says the
company wanted to evacuate him to a hospital in
Bangkok or Singapore. He and a dozen others on a
Christian medical mission persuaded the company to
transport him home to his own surgeon.
Shull says an air ambulance
flew him from Colombo to India, where seats were
removed from a British Airways jet. He was flown on
a stretcher to London. He then flew with the airline
to Toronto, where he was put on an air ambulance
plane to Saginaw, Mich., and then on another
aircraft to Traverse City.
"I wouldn't go anywhere in
the world" without air-evacuation coverage, Shull
says.
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